


Sawdust and Star-Stuff

by Liara_90



Category: Velveteen Rabbit - Margery Williams
Genre: Australia, Children's Literature, Coming of Age, Existentialism, Gen, One Shot, POV Third Person, Photography, References to Carl Sagan, Wordcount: 1.000-5.000, Written for a Class
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-02
Updated: 2017-12-02
Packaged: 2019-02-09 16:16:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12891750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liara_90/pseuds/Liara_90
Summary: For the first eleven years of her existence, Velvet Allison Wood refused to believe that she was Real.A reinterpretation of a children's classic, retold through a childhood.





	Sawdust and Star-Stuff

**Author's Note:**

> If you're reading this, you're either subscribed to Liara_90's stories, or into some _pretty_ weird tags.
> 
> An earlier version of this story [is available on my Tumblr](http://pvoberstein.tumblr.com/post/167953148293/sawdust-and-star-stuff).
> 
> Full versions of the original _Velveteen Rabbit_ are freely available at [Project Gutenberg](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11757).

* * *

For the first eleven years of her existence, Velvet Allison Wood refused to believe that she was Real.

Velvet didn’t remember how old she was when she’d first told her mother of this belief, but she remembered the response well-enough. “Believe me, dear, you felt _pretty real_ coming out,” her mother had teased, crouching low to ruffle her daughter’s hair.

A little _too_ real, if anyone else asked, six and a half pounds delivered in a bare-bones medical clinic that was more used to treating twisted ankles and split lips than premature labor. Velvet was _supposed_ to have been born in Perth, at a proper maternity hospital, but the world had never been accommodating to Mrs. Wood. She’d procrastinated a few hours too long, and then a sand storm had sealed them off from the world. Her OB-GYN became an ex-Army medic who would have much rather been treating a bullet wound.

That was how Velvet Wood had entered the world, into a mining community square in the middle of nowhere. It had vanished from the map before she’d said her first words, fluctuations in the price of zinc rendering her hometown’s existence uneconomical. Its denizens dispersed fairly quickly - if there was one thing this side of the country never lacked, it was migratory men looking for mines - and Velvet moved for the first of many times.

Moved to Silvergrass, to Tanami, to Bungaroo and Cloudbreak and Firetail... she learned the names of a dozen new homes growing up, never needing to retain the knowledge for very long. What was being mined was always more important than the name. It determined if her father would come home smelling of sulfur or coal, or simply the sour stench of the goon bag.

It might well have been her brother who planted the seed of non-existence in her head. Not intentionally, of course, but with the casual cruelty that children alone seemed capable of.

It was a sweltering summer afternoon, somewhere outside of Ora Banda, one of those unending days where they'd been left alone with two prepared meals and the telly to occupy themselves. Neil's father had bought him the newest Nintendo console as a belated birthday gift, and Velvet had spent weeks with nothing to do but sit perched behind his shoulder, watching polygonal people explore worlds far more interesting than her own.

Velvet’s mother had called home at lunch, as she always did, checking to ensure that none of her charges had strayed too far outdoors. She’d instructed Neil to give his sister a turn with the television - colorful cartoons being the usual highlight of her existence - before Neil had slammed down the handset in annoyance. Velvet had returned to her perch on the couch, her wordless presence suddenly an act of aggression.

“You’re not my _real_ sister,” Neal declared, eyes locked on the screen. “So go away.”

Velvet said nothing, just tucked her knees up to her chest. The siblings had never been close, not with seven years separating them, made 'brother and sister' by their parents' second marriages. Her mother had insisted on using the nomenclature of a normal family: Mr. Adamson was her _Dad_ , Neal her _brother_. Velvet had tried, at least at first, but her new roommate was having none of it. She later realized that he'd been little more mature than she'd been, a boy confused as to why his comfortable existence had been cast into chaos. How had he responded?

 _It wasn't real_ , Neal had hammered into her. They weren't a Real family. 'Dad' was not her Real Dad. He wasn't her Real brother.

It was only a short leap to accept that maybe she wasn't Real either.

* * *

Sometime around then - the hazy memories of childhood made making a chronology a challenge - her mother began reading to her from a storybook, on those nights when Neal’s father could be trusted to take care of the boy for a bit. It was the same story, ritually retold, only the beds and the bedrooms changing with the years. The book never did. It was _The Velveteen Rabbit_ , its pages worn and wrinkled. “It was your grandmother’s favorite book”, Velvet’s mother explained to her, “a book so special that your name came from it”. That was what had perked Velvet’s interest, for she was in a class with three Janes and four Maries, and she was beginning to notice the oddity of her name.

“When Grandma was a little girl,” her mother always began, pulling the blankets over them, “ _tinier_ than you are now, this was her _favorite_ book in the world.”

A book she’d read night after night, by the light of a lantern, at first, then by the harsh illumination of the Tube stations she’d sheltered in during the Blitz. That had been _her_ ritual, reading and re-reading the book whenever the sirens sounded, the way a man of the cloth might seek comfort in Proverbs or Psalms. Velvet’s mother had only discovered the book as an adult, cleaning out their attic, but she’d fallen in love with her mother’s telling of the story. It was one of her few keepsakes she’d kept of England, a tether to a far and distant homeland.

The story hadn’t made much sense the first time it’d been read to Velvet. What were _glades_ and _fronds_ and _bracken_? Where did the Boy live, why did his toys need to be burned? And most importantly to the young Velvet: what was _sawdust_ , and why was it stuffed into the Velveteen Rabbit? Why did the sawdust make him not Real?

Somewhere along the road to adolescence, Velvet’s mother had gotten tired of explaining it to her. Tired of skipping to the loveliest fairy who made the Rabbit Real to everyone. That just raised more questions. The Rabbit had been Real to the Boy, but not the world? Could you be Real to some people but not others? What was the difference between sawdust and fur? These questions were extremely important to the girl who wasn’t Real.

Her mother had finally taken her to the doctor, to a _Real_ doctor in a _Real_ town, who had run the usual battery of two-minute tests and declared Velvet Wood a perfectly healthy young girl. Sure, a kid insisting she wasn’t Real was kind of odd, but she still thought Barney and Santa Claus were Real, and, well, _did he look like a shrink_?

They went to a nice office next, Velvet remembered, a room with a plush carpet and lots of puzzling toys she was encouraged to play with. A woman had introduced herself to Velvet as Doctor Laura, smiling as she spoke. “What can you tell me about Santa Claus? About the tooth fairy? About Barney?” Velvet had dutifully described her belief in all of the above, simply insisting that she herself wasn’t Real.

The shrink had shrugged, racing through her notes as Velvet’s mother held her in her lap. “It was probably a vocabulary issue”, Doctor Laura had said with a sigh. “She’s latched onto the phrase because it gets a reaction from adults.” She’d handed her mother a script and an invoice, neither of which would be acknowledged.

The first _Toy Story_ movie had come out around this time. Velvet’s mother had declined to take her to it.

Things began to fall apart when Velvet reached adolescence, when her mother began wanting a more normal schooling for her daughter. That's what she argued, at least, during the rare hours when their nuclear family was awake and together. There were more problems, of course, because bonds of their sort were rarely cleaved neatly along a single fault. Her father was growing old, old beyond his years, his eyes failing and his joints ossifying; there was damage to his nerves and musculature that went without diagnosis for years. Her mother had similarly unnoticed ailments, though hers were more of the brain and soul, clinical depression atop a growing sense of alienation. Money had gone from tight to practically non-existent, jobs drying up like rain on the sand.

The desert became her home and away in those years, as the tension between her parents grew without ever quite boiling over. In another context it would have been a cliché, the kind of thing disaffected urbanites did when they wanted to ' _find themselves_ '. But the Outback had never been exotic to Velvet; the city streets of Sydney were more alien than the salt pans and black swans of her extended backyard.

It was on one of those escapes that she’d found a camera, her first stroke of fortune in what felt like many months. A tiny digital Nikon, the language settings suggesting its owner had been American instead of Japanese. She'd found it on an old signpost of what had once been the rabbit-proof fence, a relic of an attempt to quarantine the invasive pests the British Empire had unthinkingly unleashed. She took the camera back to the local Parks Australia office, offering polite suggestions as to whom the owner might have been. The only man at the desk - a bipedal Aussie stereotype if there ever was one - shrugged his shoulders. A lot of Seppos passed through, after all, and he wasn't going to spend his days mailing off everything from the lost and found. Velvet had insisted he hold on to the camera, but after it went unclaimed for a month (just as he _said_ it would), she accepted it as her own.

Around this time, Neal’s father had taken to introducing her as “my wife's little nihilist,” something always good for a quick laugh. Her mother began whispering over the phone about her rebellious daughter. Velvet had tried to explain her belief a few times, but her mind and her vocabulary had not developed in step. “Real things feel Real”, she’d tried to explain, when her pediatrician had raised the issue. “They know they are Real. I don’t, so I’m not” _._ The doctor had relayed a quick-and-dirty diagnosis to her mother - words like _dissociative_ and _delusional_ being bantered about - but they were moving the next week, and the warnings vanished from memory.

She'd gotten quite good with the camera, as good as could be expected for a child with no training or instruction. She'd figured out how to take macro photos of rocks and bugs, how to stitch together a panorama, how to snap birds in flight and roos in the savannah. But her absolute favorite technique was _long exposure_. Instead of freezing a frame in a fraction of a second, long exposure photography involved leaving the shutter open for many minutes, streaks of light appearing like painted strokes in the final image.

The Australian Outback was the perfect setting for this, and the tribulations of her life made for ideal conditions. Nobody minded - least of all Velvet Wood - if she snuck out of their flat sometime after sundown, propping her camera up on a rock to capture the cosmos. With enough trial and enough errors, she figured out how to work wonders on her Nikon, the thousand stars of the austral sky blurring together in vortices of celestial light. Her photos looked like _The Starry Night_ of van Gogh made Real, the chaos of universe extracted from calm and quiet starlight.

In those quiet minutes, those long hours she watched her camera gulp in the stars, Velvet could forget about her sawdust soul.

She returned to her ersatz family one night outside Ejanding, after the last of the wallabies had left. Her mother was swearing from the bedroom, Neal had escaped into his games. Not wanting to risk running into either adult on her way to her bedroom, Velvet contented herself with the couch, putting something on the telly to drown out the loudest of the noises: An American accent with arrhythmic over-enunciation, providing a voiceover to images of gas giants and supernovae.

It couldn't _not_ have grasped her interest, not the way that voice and those images drew her into a universe beyond her own. She watched, atypically transfixed, as the word _COSMOS_ was flashed across the screen in a garish serif font.

Most of the meaning was lost on her. She could name planets and constellations, sure as any child her age, but Carl Sagan's poetic musings on astronomy and metaphysics and _our place in the universe_ was beyond her level of schooling.

She tucked her knees up to her chest, her camera forgotten.

" _The cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths; of exquisite interrelationships; of the awesome machinery of nature_ …" said Sagan, speaking to young Velvet from across time and space. " _Recently we've waded a little way out, maybe ankle deep, and the water seems inviting._ " Images of the stars streaked across her TV screen, beyond counting and comprehension. " _Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return. And we can. Because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself._ "

It wouldn't be for several years until Velvet comprehended the science of Sagan's words. How the nitrogen of DNA and the calcium of teeth were the result of nuclear reactions in the hearts of gas giants, how the atoms of her heart had a lineage back to the heavens above. But she understood the meaning well enough, aged eleven, curled on a couch in the ass-end of Oz.

The show ended, and Velvet collected her possessions, pulling on a hat and a jumper as the shouting escalated again. She made her way to a rocky outcrop a few yards from her home, fingers fiddling with the camera as she prepared for another long-exposure shot.

She found a few stars at random - actually the Southern Cross constellation that adorned the national flag - pointing her camera in their direction and _clicking_ down on the shutter button. The camera might not have a charge for the full shoot, but that didn't bother Velvet at the moment.

She leaned against the rocks, staring up at the skies. The tale of the Boy and his rabbit returned unbidden to her mind, the toy that had made of velvet and fur and sawdust and bones. Star-stuff all.

By the eleventh year of her existence, Velvet Allison Wood still refused to believe that she was Real. She just accepted that nobody else was, either.

**Author's Note:**

> For those of you wondering, this originally began as a Modern AU story for Velvet Scarlatina of _RWBY_. Re-reading the source material she's based upon, however, it ended up morphing into a re-imagining of _The Velveteen Rabbit_ for the post-modern era, I guess. 
> 
> And yes, the word " _Real_ " has definitely lost all meaning to me at this point.


End file.
